Facebook Puts Together Some Tools For Small Businesses

Earlier this year, Facebook replaced its Preferred Marketing Developer program with its Marketing Partners Program, adding a new structure to make it easier for businesses to find partners based on specific needs.

Would would you like to see made available through Facebook's marketing partner program? Discuss.

Late last week, the company added a new small business section, which it intends to expand to offer more and more small business solutions as time goes on.

For now, there are two partners listed for small businesses: AdRoll and Constant Contact. The former helps businesses with retargeting and the latter lets you convert emails into Facebook ads.

"AdRoll's solution for advertising on Facebook gives you full-funnel, cross-device access to all native Facebook ad units. You can retarget your existing audiences, as well as reach new, high-quality audiences across desktop and mobile," the tool's page in the Marketing Partners directory explains.

According to that, you can use the tool to drive conversions by retargeting your site visitors and CRM lists across devices on Facebook, and personalize creative by tailoring Facebook campaigns to each customer's "unique browsing behavior" with dynamic creative.

It can also be used to find new audiences, reaching "qualified prospects" on the social network that are similar to your "highest-quality" website visitors.

They also suggest using this to promote app installs by targeting customers who have visited your desktop or mobile site and encouraging them to download your app.

Constant Contact has this to say in its section of the Marketing Partners directory: "We know the power email has to connect you with your current customers. And with the rising importance of Social Media to expand your reach to a new audience, we developed a way to combine the power of both: Constant Contact’s Facebook Advertising tool."

"With our advertising tool, you can easily convert a Constant Contact email into a highly targeted, mobile-optimized digital ad on Facebook in minutes, right from your Constant Contact account," it adds. "You can target a new audience with similar traits and interests as your existing customers, making it more likely that those who see your ad are interested in your product/service. You can also know what’s working by tracking views, clicks and more directly from your Constant Contact account."

Facebook's expansion of small business-oriented marketing partners is likely to prove increasingly important to its offerings. Last month, the company announced that its active advertiser count had grown 25% in 7 months.

Marketing Land spoke with Steve Irvine, the global head of the Facebook Marketing Partner program, who said that most of these active advertisers are small businesses. The publication's Ginny Marvin reports:

And with just 5.5 percent of the 45 million businesses that use Facebook Pages actively advertising, there’s obvious room for growth. “We have a strong belief that there is a lot of opportunity to extend relationships with SMBs,” said Irvine.

With these new partnerships, Facebook can meet SMB customers in marketing platforms they are already using.

Greg Sterling (also at Marketing Land) now reports that more small business partners are on the way and that Irvine said specific criteria for becoming part of the program include having "significant SMB customer relationships" in place and they must be technology driven with an SMB support infrastructure in place.